Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [14]
How would such a reframed tale read? It would be a narrative of the great reaching out by the inner One that inhabits each of us and binds us all together, a constant stretching forth of Y-H-W-H (“Being”) in the endless adventure of becoming HWYH (Hebrew for “being” or “existence”), or of the One garbing itself in the multicolored garment of diversity and multiplicity. Every creature and each cell within it would be viewed as part of this tale, a mini-adventure within the infinitely complex narrative web that embraces us all. The meaning of this great journey would remain quite mysterious, but with a glimmer of hope that somewhere in the distant future “we” might figure it all out. The evolutionary movement forward would be seen as a striving toward complexity, toward ever-thicker and ever-richer patterns of self-manifestation.
Does this One know where it is going? Here I come trickily close to, yet remain distinct from, the advocates of intelligent design as they are usually understood. On the one hand, I do not attribute humanlike consciousness to the One. There is no “plan” of Creation, no sense that humans are the apex or final goal of the process. I do not believe that the complexity or intricacy of the natural order is evidence of such design. As I said, we religious folk have no evidence, only testimony. Any attempt to claim otherwise only confuses the picture. On the other hand, however, it is fair to say that all mind and all consciousness ever to exist are part of the One. Mystics have always understood that this One transcends time, as the name Y-H-W-H itself indicates. All minds are thus one with Mind, as all beings are contained within Being. In this sense we can say that the fullness of Being's self-manifestation, including our understanding of it, is there from the start, not in the sense of active or intentional foreknowledge, but as potential that is ever unfolding. The One “knows” all because the One is all, all that ever was, is, and will be, in an undivided Self.
The reader who is aware of Jewish mystical language will understand that I am rereading contemporary evolutionary theory in the light of Kabbalistic thought. Kabbalah understands all of existence as eternally pouring forth from hokhmah, primordial Wisdom or Mind. Hokhmah is the primal point of existence, symbolized by the Hebrew letter yod, which is itself hardly more than a dot. This point, infinitesimally small, is the proverbial “little that contains a lot.” Within it lies the entire unfolding of existence, every stage in the evolutionary journey, every plant and animal as it will live, reproduce (or not), and die, all of humanity and all that lies beyond us in the distant future. All this exists in a literal sense of potential (meaning that its potency, its power, is all fully present) in that primal point. In our contemporary language, that point is the instant of the Big Bang, the moment that contains the energy of existence in all its intensity. From there it flows forward into existence, garbing or “actualizing” itself at each stage in endless forms of existence.
To say this in another way, also derived from Kabbalistic language, I am depicting the entire course of evolution as the infinitely varied self-garbing of an endless energy flow. All being exists in an eternal dialectic of hitpashtut, the emanatory flowing forth of that single energy, and hitlabbeshut, the garbing of that energy in distinctive forms. But now we add an important post-Darwinian caveat to that mystical view of existence. The only means this One has in this process of self-manifestation are those of natural selection and its resulting patterns of change and growth. It is nature (yes, “nature” could be another name for that which I have called “God,” “the One,” and “Being”). Hence the length and slowness of the journey. But precisely in this lies the utterly marvelous nature of what has come forth, step after single step. To see that process with the eye of wonder